Friends, foes, and valued aquaintances, (you know who you are,) I write to you today from a peculiar little building in northern New Zealand, upon which the sun doesn't shine and the moon doesn't grow and the grass doth not grow. I miss you all, but I miss some of you more than others. (Refer to handy chart below.)
Of the many events that transpired this week, perhaps my favorite was when we had no phones ever. The fun part though was that we definitely needed them 0.2 seconds after landing in LA after our first flight. After wandering the airport (somewhat forlornly, as we'd just said goodbye to those familial relations who'd loved us enough to bid us adieu at the airport) looking for our terminal, we made an interesting discovery. I say it was "interesting" in the way that it's "interesting" when someone tells you they just lost their job and really need money. Which by the way, happened at least once this week while I was trying to start "natural conversations" with strangers. Luckily they were paid actors and didn't throw bricks at me.
The discovery we made was that there IS no flight to NZ leaving tonight. The travel agents tried to make us think we were crazy, and had hallucinated up the whole thing, but we weren't fooled. So they told us we were staying in a hotel until our flight could be rebooked.
Naturally we were devestated. What could be worse than staying in a 5 star hotel in the middle of LA, eating steaks with $50 airline meal vouchers, and spending our days in leisure when we could have been locked in on the spiritual grind, eating gruel, and sitting through classes with new zealand locals who don't really like us. So anyway we played a lot of Cornhole and Coup to help us deal with our misery.
It was actually crazy, we did some PMG study, (thank you for shortening that, me, instead of insiting on using the full title of the book for undefinable reasons) and all bore our testimony and there was this super powerful circle of spirit and God's love and such, in the middle of a random airport, in the middle of LA. I was just thinking how crazy that is that we can have that even in crazy random places. We made tat little circle holy, through sheer force of badly explained missionary words. (Here's a plug for my farewell talk. I noticed not all of you were there. As a missionary, I of course could not judge you for not being there, but my stuffed platapus is inhibited in no such manner, and he has a message for you. As a missionary, I cannot deliver his message as it wouldn't fit the uplifting tone of this email. Good news though, you can regain Wad's respect by reading my farewell talk and emailing me kind words about how much you loved it. Words like "inspiring" and "moving" and "Sagittarius" work best.) <Insert farewell talk link.>
I've only hit leg day once in my life, no doubt good news for my mission, but before you all collectively breathe a sigh of relief, despite the statistical improbability of it, the one time I happened to hit leg day in my life just so happened to be this week, just before leaving on my mission. Thus, I spent my first 5 weeks sore. ("But Malachi! You haven't been out for 5 weeks!" "Time isn't real young one. You'll understand when you're older") Every plane I got on had me suffering, but luckily Jesus Christ bore all things, so he knows how I feel.
Sorry, back to the main storyline.
Cannon event #2: The Scam
Some of you may not know this, but every other person I meet tries to scam me. The most clever scam from this week though was actually directed at my buddy, Elder G. (I know his last name, but spelling it is hard.) Basically the airline scheduled him a flight to get him to NZ to make up for the fact that they were terrible at thier jobs and made our first flight get canceled, BUT the flight they scheduled him for had the wrong date. I mean the date was mostly right, but it was one year in the future. But that was only the beginning.
As we go to check out of the hotel after 2 full nights, one of the Elders comes over to us and tells us that the hotel had been charging us to use their phone. The elder had gotten a bill for one dollar and eighty three cents, which seemed pretty reasonable for the one 7 minute call he'd made, but unfortunatly the hotel wasn't exactly undefeated in the math department cause my bill (after the hotel generously applied a "half off" coupon) was one hundred and seventeen dollars. For 4 ish calls, all made by my companion to Travel Service or his mom. Because we were trying to get the church to tell us what to do. (We asked them what we should be doing/studying, but they were unhelpful, and told us to focus on travel. TO this day I'm not sure what they meant. Probably to spend the day in the hotel playing cornhole and coup?) I didn't have the worst of it though because I'm not a girl. One of the sisters spent a whole morning on the phone with parents who were scared to death, and her phone bill came to like $800 something. Again, after the half off coupon.
Because of our lack of phones all 30 of us missionaries who were supposed to be on the NZ flight kind of just wandered around the hotel all day like lost sheep, hoping Jesus would come gather us, and so moments arose throuout the journey where we were in need of a leader. Unfortunately the Elders who kept taking charge were the really extroverted, somewhat scary, socially awkward ones. They kept asking people for their phones, but doing it in a really energetic scary way, and so the people would flinch away and pretend they didn't have a local number. One lady eventually handed her phone over but only after nervously asking "what are you gonna do with my phone. I assured her it would be safe, but she immediately spotted the loophole there and didn't let us hold the phone. (She expected us to just grab it and run away cackling like little gremlins, which I don't blame her for assuming considering how little we'd all slept lately.) On the bright side a bald guy found us at the hotel and took pity on our poor, thin, white-shirted frames, and offered to text all our parents and let them know we were okay. Which sounded like a good idea at the time except that he created a group chat with alllllllllll the parents when he sent the picture. Needless to say, chaos ensewed.
Okay it's time to admit, I don't have spell check here, so you can either just let my typos slide or you can get allllllllll the way off my email list. Those are your choices. I don't have time for your verbal quibbles. I refuse to use big words any less frequently just because I don't know how to spell them. Quit your pedantry, dear recipients.
My favorite part of the week though, by far, was the Air New Zealand flight video. Usually these flight videos are full of scary ladies with too-big smiles telling you waaaaay too excitedly about what will happen in the "unlikely event" of a change in cabin pressure, but the ANZ flight video was something entirely different. It had a WHOLE STORYLINE about a kid who turns his treehouse into an airplane and then makes friends with a bunch of fuzzy monsters that have New Zealand accents. It's the most wholesome little movie, with a twist ending I won't spoil for you.
My second favorite part of the week was the kid who sat behind us on the airplane. He had the cutest little accent, and was overjoyed the whole time about angry birds. (For those of you who live in NZ and have never played this game before, it's a game where "You slingshot the birds and they knock over the towers. Then you get points." Most of the flight he just excitedly informed his mother of how many points he had gotten. I thought it was really generous of Air New Zealand to give us access to angry birds games on the flight, but that was the only good thing about air new zealand.
My third favorite part of the week was the pull apart earphones they gave us on the flight. I always peel them apart a little and then I'm like "I shouldn't..." and then I just keep peeling until the cords are completely separated. And then I feel a little mischievous.
SPIRITUAL LESSONS THAT COULD HYPOTHETICALLY BE LEARNED FROM MOANA BUT ONLY IF YOU WENT SO FAR AS TO WATCH MOANA:
We all have a destiny beyond the place we were born. We can stay comfortable on our little islands, but God wants more for us. He wants us to sail beyond our comfort zone, and beat the lava demons of life.
...Yeah.
You may have realized this by now, but my emails are going to be long, because they are one of the few things in this dreary world that still bring joy to my heart. Please read them anyway. If you do not, NOT ONLY will I be sad, I'll also loose a contest with my only cousin who thinks her email list is better than mine. That said, I know some of you did not ask to be here. But alas, you ARE here, and that is because I feel like I have freewill, and with that freewill I feel like I added you anyway. YOU do not have free will and thus must just read these emails despite you not having asked for them. (Also some of you are left over from my canada emails, and to you I say WELCOME.)
Everything people say about the BYU MTC food is probably false, but it is certianly true about the NZ MTC food. The eggs they gave us this morning were at least 40% water, which is a strange state for eggs to be in. The bacon was mostly raw, it taste like they took it out of the freezer, opened the ovan, and let the heat gently waft over the bacon before serving it to us. At this rate, I am not going to get big. ALTHOUGH my Comp, Elder Mark Lewis, is super cool and also super buff like unto the Big Sur, and so he's been my spotter at the local dungeon-gym so I stay locked in on my incline dumbell bench press. (You'll breathe a sigh of relief to hear I haven't been hitting legs. Just chest. And I've done north of 750 pushups over the mish so far.)
We don't have time for any Q&A action or for all the fun sections that my emails will usually contain, but please don't quit my list forever just cause this first email was long. Email me if you can, because all my teachers hate me so I could use a little love from home. And don't worry, I'll keep you all posted on every event I feel is worthy of your time and attention.
DISCLAIMER: This email has not been edited or drafted multiple times. You should be glad you're even getting ONE email this week, considering that I got this phone-brick yesterday and got access to this email like 20 minutes before I started writing this. You can just count your lucky stars you're even here. I know there's more to stay and more stories to tell but my general rule is to stop writing an email when it starts feeling like homework so I'll be back next week with another scattered update.
-Reluctantly yours,
Malachi.
P.S.
The fractured days in the title refer to the part of the week where I flew to New Zealand and Saturday stopped existing. I left on friday, arrived on sunday. If you're confused, don't worry. My journal is too.
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